My copy arrived today - seems my pre-order was a little quick off the mark, or perhaps they were expecting the worst of the mail strikes ahead. Regardless, I doubt I'll get a serious install done until the weekend anyway as I still have the final bits of hardware to shuffle between current and future main box.

As a home user, I don't see any problem with NTFS. Of all the FS out there, the one that I'd rather have might be ZFS, but that's on a seriously geeky level.

I get Windows 7 for free @ my University, but I have (noob) question: If I wanna replace my Windows Vista with Windows 7, how do I do it to avoid losing anything on my computer?

just choose upgrade option rather than fresh install, this will keep all your documents and settings, though its a bad option to choose as it will keep all vistas files on top of 7 meaning chunks of disk space being used up for no reason.

Try backing up your files and folders first and do a fresh install, it will make the system run a lot smoother.

I'd agree with Orsan - I'm a great believer in the format and fresh install. Much of the fast performance we see from new OS's is in fact down to a fresh installation. I normally reformat and reinstall my OS from scratch every 6-12 months and each time it feels like a new system or a hardware upgrade!

.
But remember that if you are about to do a fresh install then you should "deactivate" your apps where appropriate before you do anything else. Failure to do so may mean that when you reinstall them and use your activation code that activation may fail as the code has been used too many times. This happened to me earlier this year with two apps and I ended up wasting a lot of time persuading the companies concerned that I wasn't a pirate.

If you previously installed the Beta Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and relied on it "checking for updates" when you run it (it says it's doing so) then more fool you and more fool me.

Luckily I decided to uninstall it anyway and install the final release version, available here. The difference in the amount of advice offered is significant.

For the while I'm going to content myself with getting all my drivers/firmware/software up to date and then, despite having the W7 DVD within reach, hold off W7 installation for a little while longer and let the early adopters do a bit more testing for me.

The "early adopter" risk is in part why I'm building a nearly new box for Win7 than upgrading my existing main one Again I remember why I stopped tinkering with computers. Tonight I've cut myself all over my hands wrestling with a rather sharp copper heatsink, and had much frustration twiddling bits trying to find out why it wouldn't boot. Hopefully I'm not far off getting my old box back up to its original spec... once that is done and I had some food then I can start the win7 box build...

Just as well I have plenty of spares around here in case things go wrong...

. I normally reformat and reinstall my OS from scratch every 6-12 months

Same!!!

but the reason i do it is usually because i don't have a choice: typical reasons
-fried the Mo-Bo (under manufactures warranty) TG
-or get a wikid virus form all the legal downloading
-or from a HDD failure (5months ago a 750GB WD died.... only 1 year old... i ran some recovery software.... only like 50% of stuff came back, and none of it had a folder structure or file name.)

I'm impressed with the install speed. The RC was fast, but the one I just did seemed even faster, although it is higher spec hardware than the earlier test boxes. Put the kettle on at the same time I fed the DVD in. I'm at the desktop now and I've still half a mug of coffee left!

Only quirk I have to report is that after installing the Sony software CD, Win7 would not to boot up, but a system restore bought it back. I vaguely remember reading about this happening on Vista too, but as I didn't run that I never looked into it... for now I'm skipping it as I rarely use it. Now to move onto the Canon and Olympus software...

Right now I've just got the one firefox tab and couple explorer windows and lightroom 3 (x64) and im using 3.5GB as it goes through 702GB of photos on my Archived hard drive... haha.

Definately gonna buy windows 7, im sold on its speed now. I might even pick up another 6GB of ram once the prices come down again (our suppliers told us a little while ago they were set to go up in the run up to windows 7 because of some shortage in asia, true, false, who knows, but ddr3 is more expensive than when i bought it!)

Is there any sort of deals you can get through education, because I want to get Pro or Ultimate but preferable not pay £120+

Hello vincer, and welcome to the friendly Camera Labs forum!
To enjoy your stay here please have a look at the house-rules!
----
As to your questions: I Doubt that Bluray support will get into W7 anytime. So if your XP system is running well, why bother?